The drug trade and state subversion






Once heroin production reaches a certain level, it becomes a problem that is nigh impossible to solve. This is evident in the case of Afghanistan; it had reached this level in the late 90s, with harvests rising in volume each year until it became the top employer for Afghanistan’s rural populace . Once it had reached this stage, the system in place that controlled the importation of precursors and the exportation of opiates was firmly set in place, responsible for the livelihood of millions of Afghanis.

Therefore, even when the Taliban was removed in early 2002, the drug business kept going on as insurgents and criminals filled in the vacant positions in the upper echelons of the industry. However, what changed was the fact that now this drug business was no longer checked by any form of governance (however illegitimate the Taliban was) and part of its proceedings began to fund a war against the newly-instilled government in Kabul.

The present situation has seen the rise of a “neo-Taliban” which no longer accepts micromanagement from “the top leaders (who are hiding) in Pakistan” . Not only have they by large removed themselves from the central command of the Taliban, but they have also abandoned the hard-line religious convictions that defined Taliban rule pre-2001 in favour of opportunism and pragmatism. Faced with a superior military in the ISAF, the ‘new’ Taliban is desperate for financing and has no qualms taxing poppy farmers or receiving the proceedings from heroin trafficking. Since the ultimate goal of the Taliban is to repel the occupying foreign militaries and reclaim political control of Afghanistan, the illicit heroin trade directly finances state subversion.









Militant organizations and the narcotics business in Afghanistan

The dangerous nature of the illicit drug industry causes actors within it to seek security from external threats. In Afghanistan these actors require protection from regular armies and law enforcement, but also from rival anti-government factions, mercenaries and criminal organizations. Meanwhile in other countries the narcotics business is commonly intertwined with organized crime and/or terrorist organizations. In this part the thesis will explore the relationship between militant organizations and the heroin business in Central Asia.
In Afghanistan, we can distinguish three distinct categories which participate in the opiate business; government officials, criminal organizations and warlords . Government officials cannot implicate themselves directly with the day-to-day operations of the business. That leaves us with criminal organizations and local tribal warlords. This, however, is a very grey world where groups may hold individuals belonging criminal organizations and tribes at the same time.

The tradition from which both groups have risen lies in the tribal history of Afghanistan. During the Soviet-Afghan war, Afghanistan was a decentralized country with almost no central rule, instead dependent on various tribal warlords who possessed weapons and willing soldiers, under whom Afghans could claim some form of security. Drug production started to rise in the 1980s, solidified by 1987 by when opium became a “surrogate currency to fund various factions at war” .

After the Red Army removed itself from the country, these warlords retained the weapons and sources of income which provided the tools necessary to wage an insurgency. With central rule from Kabul weak, these warlords flourished in an unstable environment until their rule was met by the sudden rise of the Taliban in 1994 . During the rule of the Taliban, heroin production was consolidated with their silent approval into a system from which these new rulers of Afghanistan could extract a “ten to twenty percent ‘tax’ or levy on opium harvests” . Meanwhile, the only real opposition to Taliban power, the Northern Alliance (consisting of various ethnic tribes led by warlords), became more deeply implicated in opium production, directly protecting or assisting in the process of harvesting opium and producing opiates.
Although the rulers of Afghanistan have changed with great frequency over its recent history, several things have remained constant; the large amounts of weapons dispersed among the population, political decentralization and high levels of poverty among the rural populace. One of the great challenges of a country recovering from a civil war is demobilization. Understandably, Afghanis were unwilling to give up weapons which were the only guarantors of security in a chaotic, unstable environment. As a result, Afghanistan possessed a large amount of under-employed young men, often living in great poverty. Poverty, the abundance of weapons and the lucrative qualities of the opium industry were the decisive factors in attracting whole families, even whole communities, into the drug trade.

This has created another purpose for local holders of power to retain the weapons they retained from past conflicts. With the consistent rise of harvests leading up to 2000, “key figures” of the Northern Alliance started engaging in “production, sale and trafficking of opium” to raise finances privately or for their respective factions . Facing either this or the chance to be overwhelmed by the Taliban (due to a lack of finances necessary for their insurgency), the Northern Alliance introduced a new tradition into Afghanistan’s violent history; the merger of organized violence and the drug industry.

Since the invasion, the Taliban has been moved into a position similar to what the Northern Alliance had during their rule. Thus, accordingly, they have adopted similar practices concerning the opium industry. Meanwhile, leaders of the Northern Alliance have been slow to curb production of opium in the areas they rule over. This is the cycle consuming Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion; poverty leading to opium production, opium production leading to political instability, which in turn generates more poverty.




The ‘narco-state’ and narco-capitalism

While Afghanistan is in the midst of a violent struggle fuelled by the drug trade, the neighbouring transit country of Tajikistan has entered Corchado’s third stage where drug cartels have seemingly taken control of the state.
If one was to attribute responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the opium trade to one particular ethnic group, it would no doubt be the Tajiks, both those living in the state of Tajikistan and the large (27% ) minority present in Afghanistan. Large amounts of opium stockpiles were moved from Afghanistan into Tajikistan following the 2001 invasion, and it is believed that this would be the most suitable new host country should drug trafficking cartels be dismantled in Afghanistan.

Why has Tajikistan emerged as a hotbed of activity for drug cartels? There are several reasons, some geographical (such as the mountainous and sparsely-populated 1206 km border it shares with Afghanistan ), some structural (the lack of competent law enforcement and border control of either state) and, finally, the Tajik ethnicity connection. This connection is extremely important; the language barrier and the tendency of implicating relatives and family members into the business are key to stable, effective and safe trans-border smuggling.

Tajikistan’s government has become increasingly implicated in drug smuggling as an indirect result the rise of opium harvests in Afghanistan of the late 1990s. Mullah Omar’s 2001 ban on opium has furthered this effect, prompting many Tajiks employed in the drug trade into moving their operations further up north. The structural reasons why Tajikistan has ‘lost’ their war on drugs lie in their historical background; as a former territory of Soviet Union, Tajikistan has emerged as a state struggling to retain proper control over its territory, illustrated by a lengthy civil war with “roots in the country’s deep sub-national divisions, most notably defined along clan lines” . In terms of structural similarities to Afghanistan, Tajikistan has also experienced a power vacuum and civil war, not allowing any form of proper state-building to emerge in the wake of it.

The difference which we will explore in depth is that while Afghanistan’s government has been compelled by international pressure to fight drug producers and drug traffickers, Tajikistan’s government has by large surrendered to the drug trade. Tajikistan is a corrupt and weak state and the country contains a massive drug industry. In corrupt environments, money is power, especially so in an impoverished region such as Central Asia. This is why Tajikistan has come to be termed a ‘narco-state’ .

In practical terms, Tajikistan’s own post-2001 internal security is better than that of neighbouring Afghanistan. As its importance in the central drug trade rose after the Taliban ban on opium, Tajikistan’s ‘president’ Emomali Rahmon (in office since the creation of the state in 1992) took steps to remove political rivals until he achieved that a “consolidated Tajik political and security elite” controlled most of the state’s territory and “began to enforce a monopoly over the drug trade” .

As such, “Tajikistan sees little drug-related violence” because an unofficially state-sanctioned system is in place and there are no organizations powerful enough to destabilize it. However, that internal security comes at the expense of international security; by complying with drug cartels, Tajikistan’s government is directly responsible for the heroin that is produced or trafficked through its country and ends up in Russian, European and Chinese markets.